Racial Equality – Page 3

Occam’s Razor Again

A few days ago, I mentioned “Occam’s Razor,” the principle that the explanation of an event or condition that requires the fewest assumptions is usually the one that’s correct. (Wikipedia tells us that “Another way of saying it is that the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation. Occam’s razor applies especially in the philosophy of science, but also appears in everyday life.”)

In the years since the election of 2016, I have come ever-more-firmly to the conclusion that the explanation of MAGA–as predicted by the principle of Occam’s Razor, not to mention common sense– is racism.

There are reasons so many well-meaning Americans fail to understand this. As Rick Perlstein recently wrote, much of that failure can be attributed to coverage by the traditional media.

This failure, as I have been imploring, represents a deeply ingrained pattern, betokening a broader civic problem. In the weeks following Barack Obama’s election in 2008, America suffered an epidemic of racially motivated hate crimes: 200, all told, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. You may not have heard about that, because it was woefully undercovered by the gatekeeping organs of American political journalism. It was crowded out by their chosen narrative: that with the election of an African American president, we had overcome.

In the nation’s vaunted Newspaper of Record, a record of that portentous violence was particularly scant—even when it occurred in New York City, on the night of Obama’s victory, when a roving mob on Staten Island committed three separate assaults on minorities. The last victim they thumped onto the hood of an automobile; he spent the next month in a coma. The New York Times only ever mentioned the crime two months later, tucked away in the “New York Region” section, when the alleged perpetrators were arraigned.

I am actually somewhat sympathetic to the “we have overcome” narrative; it was certainly my initial reaction to that election. Unfortunately for its accuracy, subsequent research has painted a very different story. While many Americans (I hope and believe a majority) rejoiced at what we thought was evidence of progress, it turned out that Obama’s election operated to surface a significant and virulent racism that had been (thinly) veiled by what was then called “political correctness” and is now vilified as “wokeness.”

I recently came across an article about yet another academic study underlining the role of “racial resentment” in our current, ugly, polarized political time.

“Stop the Steal: Racial Resentment, Affective Partisanship, and Investigating the January 6th Insurrection,” relied on a national survey of adults in the US conducted in 2021. As the Guardian has reported,

Political observers are quick to blame hyperpartisanship and political polarization for leading more than 2,000 supporters of Donald Trump to riot at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

But according to a recently published study, “racial resentment” – not just partisanship – explains the violence that broke out after the 2020 election.

Angered over the claim, promoted by Trump and his closest allies, that heavily Black cities had rigged the 2020 election in favor of Democrats, white voters – some affiliated with white-nationalist groups and militias, and others acting alone – stormed the US capitol in an attempt to halt the certification of the 2020 election.

“What Trump and Republicans did was they tried to make the point that something nefarious was going on in areas that were primarily African American,” said David Wilson, dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, who published the study with Darren Davis, a professor of political science at Notre Dame.

The entire appeal of the MAGA movement has been a play on racist resentments: affirmative action and other remedial measures are really efforts to “rob” Whites, taxation of the wealthy is a ruse to enable “redistribution” to unworthy Black folks, immigration is an effort to “replace” White Christians, elections of the “wrong” people have obviously been rigged…Whatever “polite” justifications voters offer for supporting Trump, the real reason, when you peel the onion, is that he hates the people they hate: Jews, Gays, Muslims…and especially, always, Black and Brown people.

The research cited by the Guardian confirmed numerous other studies that have found a major, positive correlation between racialized resentment and support for Trump and MAGA. The potential effects of that resentment for democracy were suggested by a hair-raising quotation in the final paragraph:

“If you can get people to believe that democracy is about your freedom, and that the government is taking that away through taxes, through policies, through regulatory efforts, and [even] by fixing and rigging elections, you can stoke their resentment and they can even come to resent democracy.”

If democracy helps “them,” then democracy must go….

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Are Remedies Discriminatory?

If I started a nonprofit that provided wheelchairs only to crippled people, would I be discriminating against people who aren’t “mobility-challenged”?

If I established a mentoring organization to assist kids who were failing math, would I be discriminating against kids who were doing well in math?

What if I started a foundation focused on–and limited to– helping Black women entrepreneurs? Would that amount to discrimination against Whites and men?

The courts are about to answer that last question.

Each of the efforts I’ve described center on helping a population that demonstrably needs a helping hand: people who cannot walk unaided, kids who struggle with math, Black businesswomen disadvantaged by years of discrimination.

It turns out that the White Wing–aka the Right Wing–strongly objects to efforts to ameliorate that latter disadvantage, seeing such remedial efforts as discrimination against White folks. And our reactionary Supreme Court may well agree with them.

They might be courtroom adversaries, but Arian Simone swears she and the man suing her venture capital firm want the same thing: an America where race does not matter.

The difference is that Simone believes race-specific initiatives like the Fearless Fund are essential to achieving that ideal. Given that Black-owned start-ups secured less than 1 percent of the nation’s VC spending last year, she said, “I can’t stop.”

But the conservative activist driving the lawsuit, Edward Blum, says racial equity is not one-sided. That’s why he insists that the fund’s grant program for Black women is discriminatory, in one of the most-watched civil rights cases since he was on the winning side of the landmark Supreme Court decision that overturned race-conscious college admissions.

In the coming months, a panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Florida will decide whether to block the Atlanta-based Fearless Fund from awarding $20,000 grants to Black female-owned businesses while the case is litigated in trial court. The stakes could not be higher, as evidenced by the legal firepower lining up on both sides and the swarm of amicus briefs, illustrating the vastly different interpretations of the nature of discrimination, the role of history in shaping public policy and how civil rights should work in America.

Four years of Donald Trump’s Court appointments have distorted more than just the Supreme Court; two of the three judges on the 11th Circuit panel are Trump appointees, and according to the linked report, have appeared skeptical of the Fund’s argument that its targeted giving is “charitable giving” protected by the First Amendment.

Should Blum’s American Alliance for Equal Rights prevail, the case could have sweeping implications for any race-based initiative in the private sector, particularly grant programs, scholarships and other efforts with monetary benefits, according to observers on both sides of the issue. In less than a year, Blum’s legal nonprofit organization has reached settlements in about a half-dozen cases involving scholarships and fellowships at large law firms, as well as a Texas-based grant program for minority and women entrepreneurs. All agreed to drop racial criteria to resolve the discrimination claims.

The attorney who filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund has accused the plaintiffs of “taking the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and trying to turn it on its head, so that it becomes weaponized and undermines efforts to do exactly what the Civil Rights Act was intended to do, which was be remedial and race-conscious.”

The lawsuit is an attack on efforts at remediation. Fearless Fund was established to address what it called “the chasm in venture capital for start-ups run by women of color.” In 2018, the year the Fund was established, businesses headed by Black women received exactly 1 percent of the $131 billion invested that year. Conservatives argue that targeting investments in an effort to level the playing field is anti-business and–horrors!– meant to promote a “liberal agenda.” The lawsuit is part and parcel of the broader backlash against DEI efforts in higher education and the business world. Civil Rights organizations respond that the Fund’s grant program is a form of charitable giving — much like organizations that support people of a certain heritage, such as the Sons and Daughters of Italy in America.

As one commentator has written, the case should trouble people who value the independence of American philanthropic institutions– even opponents of affirmative action and DEI. Fearless Fund grants are awarded by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation that should have the right to target its grant program as it chooses.

Conservatives used to advocate for limits on government intrusion into private behaviors. I guess that was only so long as those private behaviors benefitted White men.

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And The Evidence Mounts….

Yesterday, I posted about the 2018 book How Democracies Die. My “take-aways” were twofold: first, the authors located the source of today’s efforts to install an autocracy in the racism that has long been identified as America’s “original sin,” and second, they identified warning signs of institutional and normative breakdown.

Several things have changed since 2018, of course, and some of those changes have been positive. Biden’s victory in 2020–a resounding popular victory despite the desperate efforts of Trump and MAGA voters to de-legitimize it–and the failure of the much-anticipated “Red wave” in 2022 come immediately to mind. But other signs are more ominous–especially the pathetic acquiescence of elected Republicans to Trump’s and the far-Right’s increasingly public racism, and the unprecedented and blatantly-partisan behavior of members of the judiciary.

Two examples from just the past week.

The Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, pardoned Daniel Perry, who had been convicted of murder for fatally shooting a demonstrator during a Black Lives Matter protest. Perry had been sentenced to 25 years in prison for killing Garrett Foster in downtown Austin in July 2020. Abbott’s hand-picked Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously in favor of the pardon.

Witnesses at the trial had testified that the man Perry shot had never raised his weapon, and according to court records, in the weeks leading up to the protests, Perry had sent multiple racist messages about protesters, shared white supremacist memes and talked about how he “might have to kill a few people” who were demonstrating. In one, he compared the Black Lives Matter movement to “a zoo full of monkeys that are freaking out flinging their shit.”

Abbot’s pardon sends a strong–and horrifying–message: in Texas, elected officials will protect racists. Even murderous ones.

Then there’s the even more horrifying disclosure that–in the wake of the January 6th insurrection– a “Stop the Steal” symbol flew on Justice Samuel Alito’s lawn.

You need not be a lawyer to share Robert Hubbell’s reaction:

As a Supreme Court justice, Alito has been unapologetic in his efforts to defend Trump’s lawlessness. He has risen to Trump’s defense with gleeful spite and unveiled resentment against those seeking to hold Trump accountable under the Constitution.

On Thursday, the New York Times revealed that Alito’s home displayed an upside-down US flag during the fraught days after the January 6 insurrection. At the time, flying the US flag upside down was a symbol calling to “Stop the Steal” of the 2020 election from Trump. It was a call to insurrection—proudly displayed by a US Supreme Court justice sworn to defend and protect the Constitution. See New York Times, At Justice Alito’s House, a ‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol on Display.

In response to an inquiry from the Times, Alito said, I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag.
Notably, Alito did not deny the veracity of the photograph of the flag flying upside down on his lawn. He did not deny the symbolism of the upside-down flag. He did not deny that he was aware of its continued presence in front of his house. Instead, he blamed his wife, whom he claimed flew the “Stop the Steal” banner in response to anti-Trump signs in the neighborhood.

Alito’s response to the Times is a lie. He owns the flag. He owns the flagpole. He owns the property on which the flag was displayed. He permitted it to remain on display on his property. He, therefore, did have “involvement” in “flying the flag.” It does not matter that it was his wife who physically raised the “Stop the Steal” banner on the flagpole. Alito’s hair-splitting denial is misleading and incomplete—and therefore false.

As Hubbell notes, this leaves us with a second Supreme Court Justice whose spouse actively supported an effort to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

Those justices—Alito and Thomas—are currently considering Trump’s presidential immunity defense to the indictment alleging that Trump attempted to subvert the election. Under any reasonable reading of Code of Conduct that applies to Supreme Court justices, Alito and Thomas should have recused themselves long ago (under Canons 2 and 3).

In a very real sense, Americans are still fighting the Civil War. Today’s Confederates are more geographically scattered, and the incidents of bloodshed and violence are being perpetrated by individual MAGA racists rather than by an organized Rebel army, but the White Supremacy beliefs motivating the combatants haven’t changed. More worrisome still, years of partisan efforts to subvert racial and religious equality and the rule of law have led to utterly scandalous, unethical, and judicially-unforgivable behaviors by two Justices of the highest court in the land–a profoundly dangerous institutional breakdown.

This is how democracies die.

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It’s All About Race

I’ve been working my way through the numerous books–both the physical ones and the ones on my Kindle–that have been piling up on my nightstand, and I’ve just finished How Democracies Die. It’s a book that has generated a lot of discussion, for obvious reasons. The two scholars who wrote it in 2018, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Zimblatt, have spent their academic careers focusing on the ups and downs of democratic governments around the globe. That focus has allowed them to draw conclusions about the normative elements that serve as guardrails protecting democratic institutions, and about the signs warning of democratic collapse.

There’s a lot to absorb from the book’s copious descriptions of democratic failures in a wide variety of countries–and the authors make no bones about the reality of the threat to American institutions posed by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. It’s all pretty grim–and entirely persuasive.

That said, I was particularly struck by one of the book’s central observations–probably because it confirms my strong belief that support for Trump/MAGA is almost entirely rooted in racism.

About halfway through the book, the authors identified two democratic norms that are essential to a functioning democracy: mutual toleration and institutional forbearance. In other words, acknowledging the legitimacy of one’s political opponents, and “forbearing” to abuse or over-use institutional weapons like the filibuster or Mitch McConnell’s legal but shockingly undemocratic theft of a Supreme Court seat. Extreme polarization erodes those norms; as they write, when societies sort themselves into political camps whose world-views aren’t just different but mutually exclusive, toleration becomes harder to sustain.

When the authors analyzed what had allowed America’s politicians to sustain basic democratic norms for a period running roughly from the collapse of Reconstruction through the 1980s, they came to a very troubling conclusion–that during that time period, “The norms sustaining our political system rested, to a considerable degree, on racial exclusion.” To the extent that America operated with bipartisanship and experienced reduced polarization during that extended time period, those outcomes “came at the cost of keeping civil rights off the political agenda.”

In the final paragraph of Chapter Six, they write

America’s democratic norms, then, were born in a context of exclusion. As long as the political community was restricted largely to whites, Democrats and Republicans had much in common. Neither party was likely to view the other as an existential threat. The process of racial inclusion that began after World War II and culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act would, at long last, fully democratize the United States. But it would also polarize it, posing the greatest challenge to established forms of mutual toleration and forbearance since Reconstruction.

That paragraph confirms what a growing body of research has verified–and what any semi-sentient observer can see. The election of Barack Obama unleashed the overt expression of formerly-suppressed hatreds. It seeded the growth of White Christian nationalism, the huge reaction against anything seen as “woke,” the efforts to de-legitimatize efforts at inclusion–and explains the utter inability of most reasonable, non-racist Americans to understand the animus and fury of the MAGA movement.

That paragraph explains so much–as does a sentence in the final chapter, in which the authors concede that it is “difficult to find examples of societies in which shrinking ethnic majorities give up their dominant status without a fight.”

Even a cursory look at the current crop of GOP nominees up and down the various state ballots shows them publicly expressing opinions that would have been met with horror not all that long ago. Anti-Black, anti-Semitic, homophobic…meanwhile, the numerous Republican campaigns expressing hostility to immigration from the south hardly bother to veil their racism.

It’s been a long time since the Civil War. It’s been a long time since the South was able to dismantle Reconstruction. These days, the country’s accelerating social and demographic changes are making it increasingly difficult to maintain the dominance of White Christians. It’s the recognition of–and hysterical reaction to– that reality that explains Trump and MAGA. How Democracies Die warns us of the way that movement threatens not just social peace/tolerance, but the continued operation of America’s democratic institutions.

I keep thinking about that slogan “The South will rise again.”

It did. It’s now called the Republican Party, and How Democracies Die documents a lesson we have yet to learn: the persistence of this country’s deep-seated racism poses an existential threat to human decency, civic equality and the continuation of American democracy.

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Using The Jews

The sudden concern over anti-Semitism being expressed by far-Right politicians is jarring to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the GOP fringe’s historic hatred. When Christian Nationalists suddenly express a desire to “protect” their Jewish neighbors, it’s not just disconcerting–it’s ominous.

Granted, there has been a sharp and troubling rise in anti-Jewish incidents, and there are good-faith efforts to address that phenomenon. Even those good-faith efforts can be misplaced; as Congressman Jerry Nadler explained in the Washington Post, despite being an observant Jew, a strong supporter of Israel and a member of Congress who has spent a career fighting antisemitism, he voted against the recent Anti-Semitism Awareness Act.

I voted against it, as did several other Jewish members of Congress. While I support the sentiment expressed by its sponsors, this bill does nothing to fight antisemitism in any meaningful way. Instead, it merely tinkers with definitions and could ultimately make investigating antisemitism on campuses more difficult in the future. In addition to trampling the free-speech rights of students and professors, this bill was disingenuously designed to split the Democratic caucus and score cheap political points.

Nadler’s final sentence refers to the fact that the far Right’s sudden, pious concerns over anti-Semitism are anything but good-faith. As the New York Times recently reported, several of the prominent Republicans who have labeled campus protests “Leftist anti-Semitism” have mainstreamed anti-Jewish rhetoric for years.

Debate rages over the extent to which the protests on the political left constitute coded or even direct attacks on Jews. But far less attention has been paid to a trend on the right: For all of their rhetoric of the moment, increasingly through the Trump era many Republicans have helped inject into the mainstream thinly veiled anti-Jewish messages with deep historical roots.

The conspiracy theory taking on fresh currency is one that dates back hundreds of years and has perennially bubbled into view: that a shady cabal of wealthy Jews secretly controls events and institutions contrary to the national interest of whatever country it is operating in.

The current formulation of the trope taps into the populist loathing of an elite “ruling class.” “Globalists” or “globalist elites” are blamed for everything from Black Lives Matter to the influx of migrants across the southern border, often described as a plot to replace native-born Americans with foreigners who will vote for Democrats. The favored personification of the globalist enemy is George Soros, the 93-year-old Hungarian American Jewish financier and Holocaust survivor who has spent billions in support of liberal causes and democratic institutions.

The linked article provided a number of examples, including Trump’s 2023 email to supporters containing “an image that bears striking resemblance to Nazi-era cartoons of hook-nosed puppet masters manipulating world figures.” The Times review found that just in the last year some 790 emails from Trump to his supporters invoked Mr. Soros or “globalists” conspiratorially, a meteoric rise from prior years, and that House and Senate Republicans increasingly used “Soros” and “globalist” to evoke anti-Semitism, “from just a handful of messages in 2013 to more than 300 messages from 79 members in 2023.”

The lengthy Times article provides numerous other examples. An equally in-depth article in The Guardian is titled “Campus protest crackdowns claim to be about antisemitism – but they’re part of a rightwing plan.” The article acknowledged the legitimate discomfort of Jewish students on campus, but noted that it has been used to justify “a powerful attack on academic freedom and First Amendment rights that long predates the student encampments – part of a longstanding rightwing project to curb speech and reshape the public sphere.”

The pro-Palestine movement has also provided cover for the right to expand its attack on protest – a project advanced significantly after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020….Alongside this effort to tar protest as terrorism, the right is seizing on the emotions inflamed by Israel’s war to make headway in a longstanding offensive on education. Over the past several years, the GOP has sought to meddle in the academic freedom of universities, which they allege are indoctrinating students into “woke”, leftwing ideology. This is perhaps most dramatic in Florida, where, in a bid to control access to history and information, Governor Ron DeSantis has all but remade the public liberal arts college New College in his image, and has introduced the Stop Woke Act, curtailing what teachers can teach on topics of race and gender.

I’d love to believe that Rightwing politicians like Indiana’s Jim Banks have suddenly awakened to the dishonesty and danger of anti-Semitism, but Jews are clearly being used as a convenient tool in their ongoing attack on an open society–and like most Jews, I know that I am only safe in a truly open society.

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